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Settler colonialism is a ‘reverse captivity narrative’: Laura L. Mielke, ‘Transforming Captivity Narratives in Kevin Willmott’s The Only Good Indian (2009)’, American Studies, 55, 1, 2016, pp. 5-30

07Jul16

Excerpt: The Indian captivity narrative genre, or “accounts of non-Indians held by Indians,” has long been described as establishing both a triumphalist narrative of national progress and a template for American identity, in contrast with American Indian identity. As often noted, the Indian captivity narrative is marked by its perpetual metamorphosis, as well as its status “as the archetype of American culture, or its foundation text.” Richard Slotkin, in his trilogy on the myth of the American frontier, traces the critical function of the captivity narrative, alongside the story of the Indian fighter, in the development of the colonial project and then national ideology beginning in the seventeenth century. The two figures of the frontier myth that Slotkin identifies—the captive and the Indian fighter—were “codified and systematized” in James Fenimore Cooper’s nineteenth-century frontier romances and have persisted in various permutations through popular literature, theater, art, and film to the present day. While political exigencies informed those permutations, so did cultural confrontation. Focusing in particular on the key roles of gender and familial relations in the genre, June Namias concludes, “The popularity of the captive story came from a fascination with both the other and the self. One’s own culture, one’s own family, one’s own gender, that whole complex of Anglo-American culture one inherited by being raised on the American continent, was brought into relief.” The captivity narrative prompted such reflection, argues Joshua David Bellin, and exhibited in a multiplicity of ways the intercultural exchanges that produced the narrative in the first place. Its descendants in literature and in film, for all of their revisions to the historical antecedents, nonetheless carry forward the record of exchange between American Indians and white captives and combatants.

Running parallel yet counter to the Indian captivity narrative tradition are accounts of American Indians held captive, or what have been termed “reverse captivity narratives.” In the context of colonial negotiations, warfare, Christian evangelism, and educational institutions, American Indians were repeatedly interned by Euro-Americans determined to exert political–geographical control and to expunge Native culture, particularly through forced English literacy. The resulting as-told-to and autobiographical narratives in English stand as echoes, revisions, and even inversions of the Indian captivity narrative. Alumni of the federal boarding school system, such as Francis La Fleshe (Omaha), Zitkala-Ša (Dakota), Charles Eastman (Santee Sioux), and Luther Standing Bear (Lakota), recount with deep emotion and sharp irony the physical and psychological pain they suffered in the process of acculturation. They also celebrate Native students’ “strategies to assert independence, express individuality, develop leadership, use Native languages, and undermine federal goals of homogenization and assimilation.” Thus, the reverse captivity narrative, like its foil, takes up questions of individual survival, cultural identity, and national membership.

What happens when the reverse captivity narrative, like the Indian captivity narrative before it, makes its way into other genres, especially film? Does the filmic adaptation of the boarding school narrative echo or depart from the adaptation of the captivity narrative? More specifically, how does the reverse captivity narrative brought to film animate the genre’s central concern with linguistic colonialism? And how does the Western—a genre grounded in archetypal struggle between savagery and civilization but perpetually revised since the mid-twentieth century to reflect the violence of US settler colonialism and imperialism—continue to evolve in the context of American Indians’ experience in captivity? In this essay, I begin to answer these questions by focusing on a recent independent film that productively, provocatively embraces the intertextuality of both the Indian captivity and the reverse captivity narratives and their role in the construction—and deconstruction—of a mythic West.


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Common ‘Wikialities’ are part of the settler colonial present: Magnus Pharao Hansen, ‘Writing Irataba: On Representing Native Americans on Wikipedia’, American Anthropologist, 2016

06Jul16

Abstract: Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that anyone can edit, is simultaneously an experiment in anarchic knowledge production and a realization of the long dream of modernity: storing all human knowledge. It is also a battleground for the politics of representation and for creating and circulating realities and “Wikialities.” I ethnographically describe how Wikipedians, most of whom are white Anglo-Americans, negotiate the representation of Native Americans as objects of encyclopedic knowledge and how the sins of our anthropological forebears come back to haunt us in this process. In 2015, I participated in the collaborative writing of the article on Irataba or Yara tav, who was an important leader of the Mohave people of California and Arizona in the late 19th century. This process brought representational dilemmas to the fore in the negotiation between the inadequacies of historical and anthropological knowledge and Wikipedia’s policies establishing how to authorize and re-represent narratives. These dilemmas point out to us, as 21st-century anthropologists, that we have a responsibility for being the stewards of the knowledge created by anthropologists past as well as for correcting their mistakes and guiding the global public of readers and writers when they make forays into our traditional territories.


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On indigenous-black solidarity under settler colonialism: Glen Coulthard, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, ‘Grounded Normativity / Place-Based Solidarity’, American Quarterly, 68, 2, 2016, pp. 249-255

06Jul16

Excerpt: We would like to begin our response to David Roediger’s provocative meditation on the historical and contemporary antinomies of solidarity (in both theory and practice) with a statement of gratitude to and political acknowledgment of the hosts of the 2015 Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association (ASA) held in Toronto last year: the nation of the Mississauga Nishnaabeg.

Toronto is an area rich in the theory and practice of Indigenous political alliance, holding the histories and presence of not only the Mississauga Nishnaabeg but also the Wendat and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. These nations negotiated and continue to practice diplomatic relationships with each other to share land while respecting each other’s governance, jurisdiction, and sovereignty. Each nation also exists in deep reciprocal relationships with the Great Lakes, in particular Lake Ontario, and the waterways that flow into it. These nations foster deep relations to St. Lawrence River leading to the Atlantic Ocean, the diverse plant and animal nations within their territories, the thunderers and rains, and all the physical and spiritual forces that connect them to this place, their place of creation, in an intimate and meaningful way.

To many of the Indigenous academics in attendance at the ASA, ourselves included, it probably came as little surprise to learn that the Mississauga Nishnaabeg, Wendat, and Haudenosaunee were not the hosts noted in the event’s call for papers and proposals, on the conference website, or in much of the ASA’s promotional materials; nor were the bulk of us likely surprised that neither their lands nor sovereignties figured much in the conference proceedings beyond symbolic opening gestures. This form of erasure—that is, the erasure of Indigenous land and jurisdiction—is one of the “miseries” that constitute Indigenous peoples’ experience of our settler colonial present, both inside and outside the academy. The erasure of Mississauga Nishnaabeg, Wendat, and Haudenosaunee sovereignty from the ASA conference is not only a reinforcement of our settler-colonial present; it is a negation of the contributions of their presence in this place, a presence that has been violently [End Page 249] attacked in the name of dispossession for four centuries. It is a negation of their intellectual and political practices of governance-in-solidarity that we ignore at our peril. This acknowledgment then, necessitates a different beginning, one in which we actively take on the contestation of settler colonization in all its violent dimensions as a point of departure, so that when we present our work on solidarity against the “misery of …,” we are not standing on the backs of Indigenous peoples but instead engaged as related comrades joined in critical co-resistance against the convergence of forces that divide and conquer us and the Earth on which we depend. It seems appropriate, then, to (re)center these issues—Indigenous land and jurisdiction—in our response to Roediger’s keynote address, and in doing so share some of our reflections on why these issues occupy such an ambivalent if not contentious place in the politics of solidarity in settler colonial contexts.

Being the masterful historian that he is, Roediger’s keynote (as well as its written incarnation published here) presents his audience with an “uneasy” (and uneven) history of subaltern solidarity across multiple axes of power and community. In doing so he not only discloses a rich history of enacting transformative alliances within and across nation, race, and class (from Ferguson to Palestine) but also uses this history to stress the importance of us confronting the difficulties and tensions that marked these past struggles in order to illuminate the ways in which they continue to shape our present.

 

Coulthard and Simpson are responding to this intervention by Roediger.


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On indigenous-black solidarity under settler colonialism: Allison M. Guess, Mistinguette Smith, Eve Tuck, ‘Reaching to Offer, Reaching to Accept: Collaboration and Cotheorizing’, American Quarterly, 68, 2, 2016 pp. 409-412

06Jul16

Excerpt: From our vantage points, land is a Black coconspiring eternal ancestor, supporting life and freedom. At the same time, in the Black or African Diaspora, Indigenous people make ancestral, sovereign relationships to that selfsame land. This complexity is at the heart of the collaboration funded by an ASA Community Partnership Grant described here. Land as a Black coconspiring eternal ancestor is evident in the struggles of historical Black women geographers such as Harriet Tubman, Queen Nanny, and Mamá Tingó and their respective abolition and maroon geographies.

Formed in 2011, the Black/Land Project (BLP) follows the examples of Black women geographers by attending to matters of Black life, histories, and futurities in particular places. As a researcher working decidedly outside the academy, BLP founder Mistinguette Smith was wary of academic researchers in BLP’s existing work in Black communities about relationships to land and place. BLP has caringly conducted more than thirty interviews, followed by workshops called “Black/Land conversations,” with Black residents of several communities across the United States. Smith’s sense was that many academic–community partnerships are interested in community-based research, but their goals and measures of success remain firmly embedded in the academy. Community-based researchers are expected to translate their work to accommodate academic audiences and to take on their preoccupations. As BLP grew and gained public recognition, academics who approached BLP with proposals of collaboration rarely understood the impact of dedicating energies to produce the emotional and intellectual labor of this translation, especially related to accommodating the gap between lived experience and the formal study of that experience. [End Page 409]

Smith met the Unangax scholar Eve Tuck in 2011 moments before Tuck and Monique Guishard cofacilitated a workshop on participatory action research ethics in New York City. Smith and Tuck discussed settler colonialism and the persistence of meaningful relationships to land among Indigenous peoples and Black peoples. In 2012–13 we received funding from the ASA’s Community Partnership Grant for Tuck to provide strategic support to BLP in analyzing the Black/Land conversations and interviews. For Smith, working with Tuck fulfilled several interconnected desires: to engage overlapping analyses of traditional knowledge, nonacademic ways of knowing, meanings of knowledge, and relationships to land, specifically connecting Black relationships to Indigenous relationships to land; to work with individuals who were not trying to help (themselves) to Black/Land’s work in an appropriative way; to increase skills in positioning Black/Land’s research as meaningful but also beyond academic research; to produce materially useful tools for community organizing. Our collaboration grew exponentially as we were joined by other cotheorists and co-researchers, including Allison Guess, Tavia Benjamin, Brian K. Jones, and Kondwani Jackson. Our collaboration was contingent—it did not ask for anything more than it could give. It was tentative, vulnerable, willing, yet with closed boundaries in many significant areas.

Though our funding from the Community Partnership Grant has concluded, our collaboration is ongoing and takes new shapes. There has been so much reaching across to each other so far, reaching across assumptions and contesting Black life as nowhere;1 reaching to offer, reaching to accept; reaching across moments of misunderstanding by building interpersonal relationships, incremental personal disclosures, which allowed us to continue to work together. The contingent qualities of our collaboration make room for BLP to not work in a dressed-up language that would put the project out of conversation with Black knowledge holders who participated in their interviews.


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Decolonisng services: Jonathan Fay, ‘Decolonising mental health services one prejudice at a time: psychological, sociological, ecological, and cultural considerations’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2016

02Jul16

Abstract: This paper describes a minority and marginalised psychiatric patient named ‘Lucy’ and offers an analysis of the multiple ‘colonising’ or ‘power-over’ relations that dominate her life. Lucy’s colonisation and consequent struggle can be understood on multiple levels: psychologically, in the struggle between the discordant parts of her personal self; sociologically, in the struggle between a mainstream culture that dominates and rejects her and her almost equally insecure place in her own indigenous minority culture; and ecologically, in the planet-wide collision between the secular materialism that drives globalism and globalisation, and an indigenous holistic and psycho-spiritual orientation to nature and the cosmos. Mental health professionals can help our patients recognise and reclaim forms of wisdom and value that survive and flourish on the margins of the mainstream. Decolonisation strategies based on this understanding suggest a variety of practical ways in which Lucy and other marginalised persons might be empowered and assisted to return to health.


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Settler colonialism as white patriarchy: Hemopereki Hoani Simon, ‘Te Arewhana Kei Roto i Te Rūma: An Indigenous Neo-Disputatio on Settler Society, Nullifying Te Tiriti, “Natural Resources” and Our Collective Future in Aotearoa New Zealand’, Te Kaharoa, 9, 2016

02Jul16

Abstract: This practice-research based article explores the relationship between mana motuhake and white patriarchal sovereignty in Aotearoa New Zealand, focusing on Ngāti Tūwharetoa as a case study. It seeks to find the relevance of Aboriginal academic Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s white possessive doctrine to the Aotearoa New Zealand context. In particular, it highlights the racist nature of the law and planning systems and their inadequacies to provide for hapū and iwi. It provides a key theoretical analysis regarding the nature of white patriarchal sovereignty in Aotearoa and the need of the state to appear virtuous, to continue the legacy that started with the Treaty of Waitangi to maintain this whenua as a white possessive. Lastly, the piece questions the position of Britishness within Aotearoa New Zealand and asks key philosophical questions for all about the need to find common understandings or māramatanga about our collective future as a society.


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On the politics of settler coethnicity: Barbara Hankes, ‘Shifting Identifications in Dutch-South African Migration Policies (1910–1961)’, South African Historical Journal, 2016

26Jun16

Abstract: This article examines the migratory movement from the Netherlands to South Africa and the associated migration policies in both countries over the years 1910 to 1961. Migration acts as a lens through which shifting constructions of national, transnational and racial identities can be observed. Depending on the politicians in charge, the contribution of Dutch migrants to the South African nation was alternately framed in terms of their white, civilised Europeanness (as opposed to black, uncivilised Africanness), and in terms of their alleged ‘kinship’ (stamverwantschap) with the Afrikaners (as opposed to the British). Under the restrained immigration policy of the Nationalist Party in the 1950s this gave Dutch immigrants a privileged position regarding admission to South Africa, and it gave South Africa a special appeal as country of destination for Dutch emigrants. This changed only when the ethnic identification with white Afrikaners, and European settlers in general, since 1960 gradually gave way to an internationally shared political identification with the struggles of black Africans against apartheid. By studying the migration dynamics between both countries we may gain insight into the making and unmaking of both Dutch and South African national and racial identifications, against the backdrop of a colonial heritage.


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On the politics of settler politics: Fall Makhete, Early Political Discord in Kenya: European Settlers’ Political Struggles in the East Africa Protectorate, 1902-1912, PhD Dissertation, West Virginia University, 2016

26Jun16

Abstract: This study of European settlers’ political struggles encompasses a ten-year period (1902-12) during which the foundations of Kenya’s modern politics were established. The dissertation follows political contestation originating from the East Africa Protectorate’s small European settler community during the administrations of four commissioners/governors. The politics of this period involved varied individuals and organizations that sought to move the colonial state in the direction of policies European politicians advocated in such critical areas as land and labor, the administration of justice, and in the system of government that applied to them and other residents of the protectorate. The settler politicians pushed for a voice in protectorate affairs on the way to the achievement of responsible government on the pattern of South Africa, from which so many of them came to the Kenya highlands. The drive to attain a “white man’s country” that marked this decade was thus very critical for future politics. The segregated system demanded by the Europeans had a huge impact on Kenyan history as did the types of organizations they founded and the tactics they adopted. Nevertheless, the European political struggles, while influential, never led to European political control and the establishment of a minority-ruled Kenya as the political agitation did not cause the Colonial Office to bow to the settler politicians’ demands.


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Comparing the politics of settler affection: Affrica Taylor, Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, ‘Kids, raccoons, and roos: awkward encounters and mixed affects’, Children’s Geographies, 2016

26Jun16

Abstract: Within the Western cultural imaginary, child–animal relations are characteristically invoked with fond nostalgia and sentimentality. They are often represented as natural and innocent relations, thick with infantilizing and anthropomorphizing ‘cute’ emotions. Our multispecies ethnographic research – which is conducted in the everyday, lived common worlds of Australian and Canadian children and animals – reveals a very different political and emotional landscape. We find these embodied child–animal relations to be non-innocently entangled, fraught, and messy. In this article, we focus on some awkward encounters of mixed affect when kids and raccoons co-inhabit an urban forest setting in Vancouver, and when kids and kangaroos bodily encounter each other in a bush setting in Canberra. We trace the imbroglio of child–animal curiosities, warinesses, risks, inconveniences, revulsions, attachments, and confrontations at these sites as generative of new ethical logics.


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The other ‘Dominion’: Dan Freeman-Maloy, ‘The international politics of settler self-governance: reflections on Zionism and ‘Dominion’ status within the British empire’, Settler Colonial Studies,2016

26Jun16

Abstract: Before falling into disuse towards the middle of the twentieth century, the term ‘Dominion’ connoted the autonomous status of select polities on the British Empire’s geographic periphery (and Ireland). This concept factored into British discourse as the extension of liberal norms of self-government. Originally associated with the British-majority settler states of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, Dominion status was in turn extended to the South African Union in 1910. Advocates for a similar form of ‘self-governance’ sought to see the example emulated elsewhere in Africa and, through the Zionist enterprise, in the Middle East. The reluctance of historians of the British Empire to examine the structural manifestations of racism in British policy has obscured the significance of the Dominion concept and its historical evolution. Settler self-governance within the British sphere is still often framed in terms of liberal conceptions of ‘responsible government’, as Lord Durham phrased it his Report on the Affairs of British North America. However, self-government on the Empire’s periphery was a patently exclusionist and racialised practice. Its exclusionist bounds were not so narrow as the Anglo-Saxonist racism that first marked its introduction. By the early twentieth century, French-speaking Canadians and Boers alike were sharing in the enterprise of British representative government. The bounds of exclusion were nonetheless unmistakable. Today, it is in respectable circles no longer acceptable to present settler rule on the African continent as a liberal enterprise. Yet the histories of the original Dominions and of the Zionist enterprise continue to be distorted by intellectuals leveraging an exclusionist politics of self-representation. The valorisation of Israel in particular through claimed rights to self-determination should prompt renewed engagement with this history. The invocation of the Dominions’ example by an earlier generation of pro-Zionist advocates speaks to a shared history that demands critical attention.


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